I was excited about 2020. I started out thinking that this year’s blessings would make up for the struggles of the two years prior. This year I would get married, move into a new home, grow through exciting opportunities, move forward with my life. Had I known what this year would bring, I would have planned differently. That’s what I like to do: plan ahead. It’s funny. In anxiety, I imagined many different scenarios for this year, but large-scale shutdowns due to a pandemic was not one of them. Turns out that anxiety-induced imagination is no match for the unpredictability of life itself.

I asked for a Passion Planner for Christmas. I was so excited about it. A Passion Planner was everything I was looking for: not only plenty of room to write down all my commitments but also room to set goals and reflect on my progress throughout the year. I was thrilled to take command of the year ahead. I wanted to invest in myself as I prepared for a new season of life. I thought this year would be a crazy flurry of plans and busyness leading up to wedding celebrations in June and September. I was saving vacation days at my new job in order to have enough to celebrate with Saulo and his family and friends in June. In April, I was supposed to be an assistant teacher, accompanist, and music director for a few classes at the Guthrie Theater. And I was beyond thrilled to be a music director for a student-derived musical production in northeast Minneapolis.

I love to plan. When I was in high school, all I did was dream about college. When I was in college, I dreamed about graduate school and potential career paths. In graduate school, I dreamed about having a fulfilling career someday. And then suddenly, I graduated. The future had arrived, and I didn’t have a plan. All I had were a few ideas that didn’t pan out; I had no idea what to do. I had dreamed many futures for myself from the age of 16 onward. I had envisioned myself as a missionary, a writer, a professional musician, a professor, a music director, a humanitarian, a lawyer. Any given week, my dreaming energy could be directed at any one of these.

It was a lot more fun to dream than it was to stare my future in the face. As it turned out, finding a fulfilling job (or any job, for that matter) was much more difficult than I had anticipated. I had never struggled to find a job before. On the contrary, I often had to learn to say no because I had too many great opportunities at my disposal. But as I sat at home with my laptop scrolling through endless job listings day in and day out, I felt completely incapable of creating a plan for the first time. All those years of dreaming, and I had no idea what I wanted. Well, I did know what I wanted. The problem was that I wanted too much. I had envisioned about seven different lives for myself, and I couldn’t imagine saying no to any one of those.

Fast forward to fall 2019, and I felt like I could have all of those lives at the same time; I just had to be organized and dedicated. I could work my full-time job for a solid paycheck and benefits. I could teach piano lessons and accompany choirs after work and on weekends. I could be on the worship team at church and lead worship at youth group. I could work at the Guthrie whenever they had classes running. And I could work at the women’s shelter a couple times a month. Right? I could do everything. And I had my eyes on more; I was chasing after everything. I was running myself totally ragged, and I realized I had to make a choice about which things were going to stay in my life and which things were going to have to step aside.

So I made some difficult choices. And I asked for a Passion Planner for Christmas. My parents gave me this gorgeous black leather planner that was full of space for all my goals and plans. I wanted to recommit myself to creativity. I wanted to prioritize my self-development and career goals. I wanted to be more intentional about my free time. I wanted to be organized and I wanted to prepare myself for marriage and the responsibilities of our new season together. I wanted to be able to envision the whole year laid out in front of me and conquer all the obstacles as they arose. I made lists. I tracked dates. I dreamed about how everything would look.

You already know what happened.

Every amazing opportunity I had from March onward was cancelled. My wedding plans were pushed back and may yet have to change again. I fell into a depression. My hopes for the future were a stronger sustaining force for my present than I realized. Turns out I was more attached to my plans than I was to anything else in my life. There is a lot for me to be thankful for right now: a strong relationship with my boyfriend, a place to live rent-free, food on the table, a steady job that I can do from home, a supportive community of people, time to pursue more creative activities, and so on. But the loss of my hopes and expectations shook me to my core. Suddenly, everything in my life turned into a question mark. Everything looked like tragedy. My plans warped into premonitions–meditations on everything that could still go wrong.

When I was doing my undergrad, I went through a phase when I begged God to burst in and change my plans. I felt a sense of regret for not pursuing ministry or missions work directly, and I wanted God to wake me up in the middle of the night and say, “Darian. Go thee therefore to [fill-in-the-blank] to do My work.” I joke, but I had a real desire for that. I realized with time that God had sent me to the right place, exactly the place He intended, so He wasn’t going to call me away from there. And I’m incredibly thankful. The last two years of my undergrad were some of the most important and formative years of my life. My first two years of college were filled with doubts, struggles, and disappointments, and I felt like my plans were not working the way I had hoped. But those last two years were more than I ever could have imagined or hoped for.

We never know what lies right around the corner. We might look at our current moment and think there is no hope for the future, but life is composed of seasons. Some seasons of life are times to dream and build in obscurity, times to grow and become who we are meant to be. It doesn’t serve us to be on the mountaintop all the time, much as we would like to believe that success looks like living in constant outward victory in every aspect of our lives.

The quarantine has taught me the value of the secret place: that place where I connect with God and let His heart change mine. We live in a culture that encourages us to share everything with everyone else all the time. It’s not always a bad thing; humans are wired for connection. But I feel a sense of shame when my life doesn’t look the way I think it should based on my social media feeds. Whether it’s my body, my relationship status, my socioeconomic status, my background, my belief system–social media has a way of making me feel wrong in every category. When the quarantine started, I needed to plan. I needed to predict what would happen because all my plans were falling apart. Everything I had used to define myself in the past year was put on hold.

I had to return to the practice of letting the Creator define me. My plans had become so important to me that anything and everything else faded into the background, including being thankful for blessings of the past and the present. In a way, it was manic ambition, a clinging to the “successful life” hanging by a thread in the months and years to come. It only gave birth to greater anxiety, as I began to fear who I would be without my plans. What if things didn’t look the way I thought they should? Who would I be? How would I ever manage the disappointment?

Life is so much more. It’s not about my plans. My perspective is so limited. One twenty-six-year old white female from a small town in rural Minnesota among nearly 7.6 billion others in a world in which none of us has the ability to grasp fully even one single aspect of our lives. I’m so thankful for God’s plans. I’m so thankful for His kindness and mercy when my plans fall apart. I can’t pretend that I understand, but understanding was never the point. Relationship is what matters. Trust. I admit my own weakness in not knowing the best timing for anything. For me, the best timing is always now. But He sees me and knows me, never leaving my side when it feels like everything is falling apart. In admitting my own weakness and submitting to the process of the moment, taking in the present and leaving the future to Him, I can dream without loving the dreams more than I love the Creator who gave them to me.